The Donald has taken Jeb Bush to task for defending his brother's record on 9/11. Shockingly, he's making sense

For the first time perhaps ever, Donald Trump was right about something. There exists irrefutable evidence that George W. Bush and his national security team was repeatedly warned about the impending September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and failed to do a damn thing in the face of those warnings. “Warnings,” plural, is appropriate grammar here since it wasn’t just the single President’s Daily Brief (PDB) dated August 6, 2001 that should’ve raised serious concerns at the White House that an epic-scale attack by Osama Bin Laden was forthcoming. Indeed, there were many, many others. We’ll circle back to this point.

“What [Trump] said is just not true. The truth is that George W. Bush inherited all sorts of things from the Clinton administration, including intelligence agencies and others who were…not sharing information across agencies.”

On the contrary, every word of what Trump said was 100 percent accurate.

FACT: There were numerous instances when the Bush administration failed to act in accordance with intelligence community warnings about Bin Laden and subsequently attempted to cover up not only its inaction but also aspects of the aftermath — with zero outrage or obsessive hobby-horsing from Fox News or congressional Republicans. Instead it was all met with the usual refrain: Don’t try to undermine the commander-in-chief while troops are in harm’s way, you unpatriotic, terrorist-loving America-haters.

Vanity Fair’s Kurt Eichenwald, author of “500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars,” reported back in 2012 that the infamous August 6, 2001, PDB wasn’t the first time the Bush administration was warned of a massive attack being prepared by Bin Laden and his al-Qaeda co-conspirators, and yet there’s no indication Bush took any significant or even cursory action to disrupt the plot. (I hasten to note: This is in no way an endorsement of the conspiracy theory that Bush deliberately allowed the attacks to occur.)

But let’s run through the timeline:

• From the beginning, Richard Clarke, a holdover Clinton administration counter-terrorism adviser, desperately attempted to repeatedly warn then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice about an impending Bin Laden attack. Clarke warned of “an immediate and serious threat to the United States” at the hands of Bin Laden.

• May 1, 2001: Eichenwald reported that the president was briefed by the CIA that there were plans being assembled for an attack by “a group presently in the United States.”

• June 22, 2001: Bush received a PDB that warned of an “imminent” al-Qaeda attack during a “flexible timeline.” The neocons in the White House, meanwhile, believed that Bin Laden was a distraction from an actual plot by Saddam Hussein. The pretext for an invasion and regime change in Iraq had obviously been on the table for many months. In spite of its participation on Iraq, the CIA urged the White House to not ignore Bin Laden.

• June 29, 2001: Another PDB outlined in detail an impending attack by Bin Laden. Eichenwald noted that this brief emphasized “dramatic consequences,” “including major casualties.”

• July 1, 2001: The White House is instructed in yet another PDB that the attack had been postponed, but “will occur soon.”

• July 9, 2001: The CIA’s Counter-terrorism Center staffers held a meeting in which one senior official recommended that everyone resign so as to not be blamed for the impending attack.

• July 11, 2001: The White House is informed that al-Qaeda-linked radical Ibn Al-Khattab told his supporters that “there would soon be very big news.” The CIA brief included more information about a possible attack.

• July 24, 2001: The White House is again warned of preparations for an attack in “a few months.” Eichenwald wrote that Bush wasn’t convinced and requested a “broader analysis on al-Qaeda.” This analysis became the infamous August 6 PDB.

• August 4, 2001: 9/11 co-conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, whose flight school attendance was noticed by intelligence officials, is picked up and charged on immigration violations.

• August 6, 2001: While vacationing in Crawford, Bush receives the notorious PDB titled, “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US.” No action was ever taken by the administration to intervene.

Following September 11, the Bush administration repeatedly stonewalled the formation of a commission to investigate the attacks and instead set about the process of tying 9/11 to Saddam Hussein while selling an invasion of Iraq to the American people.

I’ve said it before: If roles had been reversed and there had been a Democratic president on 9/11, he or she wouldn’t have been merely investigated — impeachment would’ve absolutely begun while Ground Zero was still smoldering. How do we know this? Just look at the outrage and righteous indignation over an attack with four American casualties. Now add 2,973 more and a very long paper trail showing negligence preceding the deaths and rampant misinformation following them.

Furthermore, and in addition to five previous investigations, the current Benghazi select-committee has been assembled for almost as many weeks (75 weeks) as the 9/11 Commission (84 weeks). By the time it’s adjourned permanently, it will have easily far exceeded the 9/11 investigation. As of this writing, $4.5 million has been wasted on Trey Gowdy’s political theater. And, to this day, no one has been able to prove malfeasance or negligence on behalf of President Obama and his team, including Hillary Clinton. We can hardly say the same for President Bush.

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Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump on Saturday mocked fellow contenders Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) at a rally in their home state of Florida.

Trump teased Bush, a former Florida governor, for his recent decision to lay off campaign staff and cut salaries by 40 percent, and for his planned retreat with donors in Texas on Sunday.

"Bush has no money, he's meeting today with mommy and daddy, and they're working on his campaign," Trump said at the rally in downtown Jacksonville, Fla. "He's a guy wants to run our country and he can't even run his own campaign. Think of it," he added.

The billionaire business mogul also tried to draw a contrast between Bush's campaign and his, saying he has fewer campaign staff and has spent the least money of all the candidates so far.

"You have all these people, what do you need these people for?" he said. "I put up less money than everyone else, and I'm number one."

Trump is leading in Florida, according to a recent University of North Florida poll of likely Republican primary voters, with 22 percent support.

Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson had 19 percent, while Rubio came in third with 15 percent, and Bush was fourth, with 9 percent.

"I'm not going anywhere, I'm going to stay!" Trump said. "All these people are spending money. Wouldn't it be nice to have a county that spends the least but is number one?"

The businessman also said he was amused by watching Bush and Rubio fight.

"[Rubio] was very disloyal to Bush. Everybody admits that Bush was his mentor," he said. "They're fighting like crazy. I'm laughing watching them fight."

"And he needs a lot of water on top of everything else," Trump said, in a reference Rubio's 2012 State of the Union Republican response speech where he notably took a drink of water in the middle of his speech.

"Have you ever seen a guy sweat like Rubio?" Trump asked. He also derided Carson, who in some Iowa polls is leading Trump, as "super low on energy."

Much of the attention paid to Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign has to do with the s-word: Can a socialist be elected president? How much of a socialist is he? What exactly is socialism?

What many haven't picked up on is that a Sanders presidency would be a first in a couple other ways. First, Sanders would be our first Jewish president. And second, while Sanders is culturally Jewish, he has said that he's "not particularly religious" and has been described by some as agnostic.

Asked during an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel's show this week whether he believed in God, Sanders demurred.

"I am who I am," Sanders said. "And what I believe in and what my spirituality is about, is that we're all in this together. That I think it is not a good thing to believe that as human beings we can turn our backs on the suffering of other people."

Sanders added: "This is not Judasim. This is what Pope Francis is talking about -- that we cannot worship just billionaires and the making of more and more money. Life is more than that.”

Cesca makes good points when discussing the mistakes of Bush and the neocons. But then, we all knew they weren't the sharpest tools in the box anyway.

His other comments about how ill-treated the Dems have been is merely more partisan pap. How the Dems (or GOP for that matter) are treated depends on how many seats they have in Congress.

As for Cesca himself,

About Cesca, Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks has said that "Bob's writing is totally fearless. That's what I love about it." [9] In 2013, after whistle-blower Edward Snowden revealed NSA overreach, Cenk said, "Bob is good guy, smart guy, I like him, but ... there isn't anything Obama does that [Bob] wouldn't jump to the immediate, enormous and 110% defense of."[10]

Uygur is a reformed conservatives. I think he calls himself a progressive.

Magnificent Ronald and the Founding Fathers of al Qaeda

“These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America’s founding fathers.” — Ronald Reagan while introducing the Mujahideen leaders to media on the White house lawns (1985). During Reagan’s 8 years in power, the CIA secretly sent billions of dollars of military aid to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in a US-supported jihad against the Soviet Union. We repeated the insanity with ISIS against Syria.